Weekend Box Office: 'Karate Kid' Wins 80s Throwback Weekend

The oddness of 80s stalwarts The A-Team and Karate Kidgoing head-to-head was the talk of the weekend, with Eric D. Snider giving us the gift of this post, and #tweetsfrom1984 being the obligatory Twitter meme. Unsurprisingly, The Karate Kid emerged victorious despite a nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time. The huge $56 million opening (further) assures stardom for the ridiculously self-assured Jaden Smith, and threatens the possibility of a string of sequels to the good-natured, well-executed remake. That second part cannot end well.

The A-Team wound up in second place with $26 million. That's probably as much as could reasonably have been expected once it became apparent that the movie would be a fairly non-descript actioner -- and would be marketed as such. The expensive "reboot" will attempt to make up the lost ground overseas and on DVD. It's unlikely to gross more than $60 million domestically.

Shrek Forever Aftercontinued to hold up fairly well, though it will still end up the lowest-grossing film in the franchise. I wonder how committed Dreamworks is to making this the last in the series; I note that they backed away from the Final Chapter subtitle in the weeks before release. Meanwhile, the middle of the top-10 list reads like a list of the summer's big box-office disappointments:
Killers,
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and
Sex and the City 2 have all failed to get traction domestically, though the latter two films have impressive foreign grosses to tide them over. (Speculation regarding why Sex and the City is so popular overseas is welcome.)